Ten entries in this archive describe killings that happened while the state was preoccupied with something larger. Five are from South Africa under apartheid, three are from wartime, and two are from China during national anti-crime campaigns. Read together they say something about how much police attention is a resource rather than a constant.
The South African cluster is the clearest, and it is clearest because the same township appears three times.
Elias Xitavhudzi, Johannes Mashiane and Moses Sithole all killed in and around Atteridgeville, a township west of Pretoria established under apartheid's forced removals. Xitavhudzi was known as Pangaman, after the panga he used. Johannes Mashiane, called the Beast of Atteridgeville, was never tried: he died in October 1989 after jumping under a bus while being chased by police. Sithole killed thirty-eight women between July 1994 and October 1995, in the first two years after apartheid ended.
Mashiane's entry states the mechanism plainly: the killings of boys from an African township in the last years of apartheid received little official urgency, and Atteridgeville residents said afterwards that they had reported the disappearances and been ignored. That is the same finding that appears in this archive under a different heading, in the sixteen cases where nobody was reported missing, except here the reason is not that the reports were never made. They were made, and they were not acted on, because of where they came from.
Norman Afzal Simons was a primary school teacher in Mitchells Plain, one of the Cape Flats townships built under the same removals. Louis van Schoor was a former policeman and dog handler running a private security firm in East London, and he shot people he found on commercial premises, the entry records his nickname as the Apartheid Killer, which is what the case was understood to be about at the time.
Gamal Lineveldt was convicted of four murders in wartime Cape Town in 1941, and his entry is explicit about why so little survives about the women he killed: they were working-class women of color, and the contemporary record did not treat their names as worth keeping.
The other wartime cases work differently. Paul Ogorzow was a railway worker and a Nazi party official who raped and killed eight women on and beside the Berlin S-Bahn during the blackout, throwing several from moving trains. The blackout gave him the darkness and his party position slowed the investigation. Miyuki Ishikawa ran a maternity hospital in wartime Tokyo where more than a hundred infants died of deliberate neglect while she collected fees from the parents. She was sentenced to eight years, reduced to four on appeal, which is the reason the case still causes anger in Japan.
China's two are the inverse: not a state paying too little attention, but a state paying a particular kind.
Zhao Zhihong's case is the one to read. A man was arrested for a killing in Hohhot in 1996, convicted, and executed sixty-one days after the death, in the course of a national anti-crime campaign under which cases were processed at speed. The man was Huugjilt, and he was eighteen, and he had reported the attack himself. Zhao confessed to it in 2005. Huugjilt was declared innocent in December 2014, eighteen years after he was shot, and twenty-seven officials were disciplined or investigated.
Zhang Lisong's entry names the same machinery, the yanda campaigns, in which capital cases were tried and carried out on timetables that left no room for appeal in any meaningful sense.
What the ten have in common is that the amount of official attention available to a killing is not fixed. It varies by the year, by the war, by the political priority of the month, and by who the dead were. A campaign that processes cases at speed produces both executions and wrongful ones. A state that does not consider a township's missing boys urgent produces a longer series.
None of that changes what the people in these entries did. It changes how long they were able to keep doing it.